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Chapter 1

Holistic Thinking and the

Reconstruction of the Notions
of Harmony and Spontaneity,
Order and Revolt
Roger T. Ames

The starting point for the many resonances to be found between the pragmatism of
John Dewey and the philosophy proffered in the canons of classical Confucianism is
their shared commitment to holistic thinking—what A. N. Whitehead would describe
quite simply as a commitment to an aesthetic as opposed to an abstracted rational
sense of order.4 The cosmological assumptions of both Deweyan pragmatism and
Confucianism with respect to harmony and spontaneity, order and revolt are
grounded in an empirical naturalism that precludes appeal to any independent
supernatural or metaphysical sources lying outside of experience and that rules out
the possibility of a mind-independent understanding of experience.
In this essay I will first examine the Deweyan notion of experience.5 It follows
from Dewey’s understanding of experience as being resistant to any and all forms
of dualism—including that of subject and object—that any exploration of Dewey
on experience will necessarily require an account of its resolutely subjective
dimension. We will then turn to classical Confucian philosophy, and by examining
the traditional focus-field understanding of persons and their environments, we
will establish a shared aestheticism as an interpretive context for reconsidering
and reconstructing an understanding of the relationship between harmony and
spontaneity, and between order and revolt.
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2 Order and Revolt

Deweyan Pragmatism and the Holistic

Nature of Experience
Dewey, in “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism,” is explicit in his insistence
that we rely upon our immediate experience as the appropriate resource for
philosophical speculation and that we owe it our ultimate allegiance in evaluating
these same conjectures. In his own language: “Immediate empiricism postulates
that things—anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the
term ‘thing’—are what they are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe
anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as.”6
For Dewey, all experiences, regardless of their ultimate veracity, are equally
real. In this claim, Dewey seems to be reiterating William James’s understanding
of “radical empiricism” that his mentor defined in the following terms: “To be
radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that
is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly
experienced.”7
Although Dewey is certainly influenced by James, the important difference
between James and Dewey is that Dewey wants to reject any notion of primal
stuff out of which experience evolves and to assert an ontological parity among all
experiences as such:

There is, then, from the empiricist’s point of view, no need to search
for some aboriginal that to which all successive experiences are
attached, and which is somehow thereby undergoing continuous
change. Experience is always of thats; and the most comprehensive
and inclusive experience of the universe that the philosopher himself
can obtain is the experience of a characteristic that.8

Dewey wants to argue for the reality of “that experience” and “experienced as.”
This is what he means when he claims that “by these words [that and as] I want
to indicate the absolute, final, irreducible and inexpungable concrete quale which
everything experienced not so much has as is.”9
The contemporary pragmatist Hilary Putnam offers an interpretation of
experience that is consistent with Dewey in highlighting the irreducibly subjective
dimension of what Dewey calls “that” or “as.” In Putnam’s rejection of the objective
mind-independent world of naive realism, he argues that “elements of what we call
‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into what we call ‘reality’ that the very
project of representing ourselves as being ‘mappers’ of something ‘language-
independent’ is fatally compromised from the start. Like Relativism, but in a
different way, Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from Nowhere”10
(italics in original).
Putnam continues by insisting that this kind of human penetration and
transformation of our environments extends to our attention and valorization
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[ED: Pls check

Holistic Thinking and the Reconstruction of the Notions of Harmony 3 shortened RH?]

of the world in which we live and requires us to accept our own reflexivity as
“beings who cannot have a view of the world that does not reflect our interests and
values.”11 For Putnam, like Dewey, we are part and parcel of what experience really
is: “The heart of pragmatism, it seems to me—of James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism
if not of Peirce’s—was the supremacy of the agent point of view. If we find that
we must take a certain point of view, use a certain ‘conceptual system,’ when
engaged in a practical activity, in the widest sense of practical activity, then we
must not simultaneously advance the claim that it is not really ‘the way things are
in themselves.’”12
Dewey, in invoking truisms such as “experience is experience” and “it is what
it is,” provides us with a philosophical methodology for clarifying the many
distinctions that we rely upon to think philosophically: “If you want to find out
what subjective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic, psychic, cause, substance,
purpose, activity, evil, being, quality—any philosophic term, in short—means, go to
experience and see what the thing is experienced as.”13
Of course, in this particular essay, I want to add harmony, spontaneity, order,
and revolt to Dewey’s list of philosophical terms, anticipating that they too must
be reconstructed when examined through the lens of the wholeness of experience.
But to be true to Dewey’s own premises, such holism requires that these abstract
cosmological notions be understood reflexively and thus be given the concrete
context of subjective experience. To provide such a context, I will turn to one of
Dewey’s most revolutionary theses arising from his immediate empiricism—that is,
his relational and transactional understanding of organism and environment when
it is applied to the process of becoming a person. Dewey’s holism requires that the
notion of person be understood as being radically embedded in experience as a
vital configuration of aggregating conduct—what Dewey describes as a habitude.

Dewey and the Transactional, Gerundive

Notion of Individuality
Dewey, in his phenomenology of human conduct, combines the process psychology
of William James and the social psychology of George Herbert Mead to locate persons
as foci of activity within their natural and social relations. He follows Mead, who
insists that “self” is coterminous with the world:

The self cannot arise in experience except as there are others there.
The child experiences sounds, etc., before it has experience of its own
body; there is nothing in the child that arises as his own experience
and then is referred to the outside things. . . . Only a superficial
philosophy demands the old view that we start with ourselves. . . .
There is no self before there is a world, and no world before the self.
The process of the formation of the self is social.14
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4 Order and Revolt

Mead and Dewey too are revolutionary within the Western narrative in dispensing
with the “old psychology” that begins from assumptions about a superordinate and
discrete psyche. In his Human Nature and Conduct (perhaps more appropriately
titled Human Nature as Conduct), Dewey calls into question the separation of
“human nature” and “conduct” by disputing the very distinction between them.
Indeed, Dewey shaves with Ockham’s razor by dispensing with the notion of a
superordinate and hence reduplicative person in any of its permutations—soul,
self, psyche, mind, character, agency, and so on. He insists that cultivated moral
dispositions as habits of conduct are themselves the evolving reference of what
it means to become a consummate person. In seeking to overcome the default
assumptions that have become entrenched within his own tradition, Dewey is
obliquely critical of his mentor, James, who is not always consistent on the status
of the individual person:15 “The doctrine of a single, simple and indissoluble soul
was the cause and the effect of failure to recognize that concrete habits are the means
of knowledge and thought. Many who think themselves scientifically emancipated
and who freely advertise the soul for a superstition, perpetuate a false notion of what
knows, that is, of a separate knower.”16
Dewey instead, in a different language but analogous in many ways to the
Confucian notion of a relationally constituted person, which I will describe below,
arrives at an understanding of the human being as a dynamic combination of habit
and impulse: “Now it is dogmatically stated that no such conceptions of the seat,
agent or vehicle will go psychologically at the present time. Concrete habits do all the
perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling, judging, conceiving and reasoning that
is done. ‘Consciousness,’ whether as a stream or as special sensations and images,
expresses the functions of habits, phenomena of their formation, operation, their
interruption and reorganization. . . . A certain delicate combination of habit and
impulse is requisite for observation, memory and judgment.”17
Dewey further insists the initial biological and social conditions situating us
within community need to be taught through a robust process of nurturance and
growth: “We are born organic beings associated with others, but we are not born
members of a community.”18 For Dewey, “individuality” is not quantitative: it is
neither a presocial potential nor a kind of isolating discreteness. Rather, it is a
qualitative achievement, arising through distinctive service to one’s community.
Individuality is “the realization of what we specifically are as distinct from others,”19
a realization that can take place only within the context of a flourishing communal
life. “Individuality cannot be opposed to association,” says Dewey. “It is through
association that man has acquired his individuality, and it is through association
that he exercises it.”20 An individual so construed is not a discrete “thing” but a
“patterned event,” describable in the language of uniqueness, integrity, social
activity, relationality, and qualitative achievement.
Dewey appeals to the actual situated human experience as we live it in rejecting the
notion of an autonomous “self” that is ostensively prior to an organic configuration
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Holistic Thinking and the Reconstruction of the Notions of Harmony 5

of relations and in questioning the putative priority of self-based instincts to

shared cultural life-forms. He is, in his own tradition, a flat-out revolutionary in
insisting upon the primacy of the relationally constituted, concrete situation as
the garden of social intelligence and the soil that nourishes the blossoming of the
moral life. The optimally appropriate response to our ever-present uncertainties,
and any confident resolution of these uncertainties, can be negotiated only within
the actual circumstances themselves, with any notion of individual agency itself
being an abstraction from these circumstances:

The primary significance of the unique and morally ultimate character

of the concrete situation is to transfer the weight and burden of
morality to intelligence. It does not destroy responsibility; it only
locates it. A moral situation is one in which judgment and choice are
required antecedently to overt action. The practical meaning of the
situation . . . the action needed to satisfy it—is not self-evident. It has
to be searched for.21

Dewey, in this social construction of the person, rejects the idea that persons
are not only incomplete outside of the association they have with other people but
in fact have no point of reference beyond this context. Importantly, in this notion
of relationally constituted and emergent “individuality,” to say that persons are
irreducibly social is not to deny the integrity, uniqueness, and diversity of human
beings; on the contrary, it is to affirm the achievement of these conditions. Said
succinctly, we are who we are not exclusive of our relations but because of them.

Confucian Cosmology and the Focus-Field

Nature of Experience
In what way does a person become consummately human? This is the perennial
Confucian question asked explicitly in each of the canonical Four Books. And the
answer from the time of Confucius onward continues to be a moral, aesthetic, and
ultimately religious one. One becomes human by cultivating those thick, intrinsic
relations that constitute one’s initial conditions and that locate the trajectory of
one’s life force within family, community, and cosmos.22 “Cultivate your person”—
xiushen 修身—the signature exhortation of the Confucian canons—is the ground of
the Confucian project of becoming consummate as a person (ren 仁): It is to cultivate
one’s conduct assiduously as it is expressed through those family, community, and
cosmic roles and relations that one lives. In this Confucian tradition, we need each
other. If there is only one person, there are no persons.23 Becoming a person is
something that we do and that we either do together or not at all.
The Great Learning 大學, the seminal, foundational document that sets and
anchors this Confucian project early in the tradition, describes the process of
becoming human, insisting that it is only through committing oneself to a resolute
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6 Order and Revolt

regimen of personal cultivation that one can achieve the comprehensive intellectual
and moral understanding that will make the most of the human experience for
each of us in our families and communities. The central message of this terse yet
comprehensive document is that while personal, familial, social, political, and
indeed cosmic cultivation is ultimately coterminous and mutually entailing, it
must always begin from a commitment to personal cultivation. In the enduring
language of the text itself:

The way of achieving greatness through learning lies in demonstrating

real personal excellence, in cherishing the common people, and in
dedicating oneself to doing what is best. Such a course of learning
can only be set once one has made this commitment. Only in having
set such a course is one able to find equilibrium, only in having found
equilibrium is one able to become self-assured, only in having become
self-assured is one able to be deliberate in what one does, and only in
being deliberate in what one does is one able to get what one is after.
There is the important and the incidental in things and a beginning
and an end in what we do. It is in realizing what should have priority
that one approaches the proper way (dao).24

Having endorsed the priority of making a commitment to personal cultivation,

the text continues by rehearsing the cosmic proportions of the achievement of the
ancient sage-kings once they dedicated themselves to this project:

The ancients who sought to demonstrate real excellence to the

whole world first brought proper order to their states; in seeking to
bring proper order to their states, they first set their families right;
in seeking to set their families right, they first cultivated their own
persons; in seeking to cultivate their persons, they first knew what
is proper in their own hearts-and-minds; in seeking to know what is
proper in their hearts-and-minds, they first became sincere in their
purposes; in seeking to become sincere in their purposes, they first
became comprehensive in their wisdom. And the highest wisdom lies
in seeing how things fit together most productively.

Once they saw how things fit together most productively, their wisdom reached
its heights; once their wisdom reached its heights, their thoughts were sincere;
once their thoughts were sincere, their hearts-and-mind knew what is proper; once
their hearts-and-mind knew what is proper, their persons were cultivated; once
their persons were cultivated, their families were set right; once their families
were set right, their state was properly ordered; and once their states were properly
ordered, there was peace in the world.25
Each person stands as a unique perspective on and a unique opportunity for
family, community, polity, and cosmos, and through a dedication to deliberate
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Holistic Thinking and the Reconstruction of the Notions of Harmony 7

growth and articulation, all have the possibility of bringing the resolution of the
web of relationships that locate and constitute them within family and community
into clearer and more meaningful focus. The “learning” (xue 學) of The Great
Learning is nothing more or less than the cultivation of productive, transpersonal
habits of conduct.26
As The Great Learning enjoins us, in the singularly important project of becoming
consummate persons, we must get our priorities right: “From the emperor down
to the common folk, everything is rooted in personal cultivation. There can be
no healthy canopy when the roots are not properly set, and it would never do for
priorities to be reversed between what should be invested with importance and
what should be treated more lightly.”27
The Record of Rites (Liji 禮記) version of The Great Learning brings this text to
its conclusion by declaring that giving priority to achieving personal excellence is
wisdom at its best. In its own words: “This commitment to personal cultivation is
called both the root and the height of wisdom.”28
Just as in the life of any plant form, the “root” of personal cultivation and its
ultimate product, wisdom, far from being separate and distinct, are perceived as
an organic whole that must grow together or not at all.
In appealing to an understanding of Chinese natural cosmology as the relevant
interpretive context for this Confucian project, I want to provide a language that
will distinguish this worldview from the reductive, single-ordered “one-behind-
the-many” ontological model that grounds classical Greek metaphysical thinking,
wherein one comes to “understand” the many by knowing retrospectively the
foundational and causal ideal that lies behind them. Instead, we find that in
Chinese cosmology there is a symbiotic and holistic focus-field model of order
that is illustrated rather concisely in the organic, ecological sensibilities of
The Great Learning 大學. As we have seen, this text begins from the ecological
interconnectedness and interdependence of all of the many dimensions of
the human experience within which this collaborative process of personal
consummation is to be pursued. The Confucian project begins from a recognition
of the wholeness of experience and the constitutive nature of relationality entailed
by it. Moreover, because each person and event is constituted by an interdependent
web of relations, what affects one thing affects all things. Meaningful relations
within this family make the entire cosmos more meaningful; relations that remain
barren detract from it.
The meaning of the family is implicated in and dependent upon the productive
cultivation of each of its members. And by extension, the meaning of the entire
cosmos is implicated in and dependent upon the productive cultivation of each
person within the family and community, just as an entire symphony lies implicated
within each note that expresses it. Personal worth is the source of human culture,
and human culture in turn is the aggregating resource that provides a context for
each person’s cultivation.
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8 Order and Revolt

Said another way, within the correlative cosmology that serves as context for
the development and evolution of Confucianism, nothing happens on its own.
Nothing happens unilaterally and in isolation. Physically, breathing is a symbiotic
collaboration between lungs and air, seeing between eyes and sun, running between
legs and ground, and socially, friendship is a concrete relationship between friend
and friend. All activity occurs within a context and is thus necessarily collateral
in nature. Unsurprisingly, we find that all of the terms of art defining the Chinese
natural cosmology are binomial rather than singular, reflecting this ubiquitous
collaterality. The vocabulary is transactional and collaborative: “the natural,
cultural, and numinous context and humanity” (tianren 天人), “the heavens
and the earth” (tiandi 天地), “forming and functioning” (tiyong 體用), “flux and
continuity” (biantong 變通), “the furthest reaches and beyond” (taiji/wuji 太極無
極), the yin and the yang 陰陽, “this particular vital focus and its field” (daode 道
德), “configuring and vital energy” (liqi 理氣), “determinacy and indeterminacy”
(wuyou 無有), and so on. No term can stand alone as an independent,
determinative principle. There can be no superordinate and independent “one” in
this ecological cosmology—no single cause; no grounding, foundational standard;
no one privileged order. Consonant with this observation, the distinguished
French scholar Marcel Granet, like many other preeminent Chinese and Western
sinologists in their own terms, tells us that “Chinese wisdom has no need for the
idea of God,”29 no need for some ultimate One that explains the many.
While certainly having important theoretical implications, the enduring power
of this Confucian project is that it proceeds from a relatively straightforward
account of the actual human experience. It is a pragmatic naturalism in the sense
that, rather than relying upon metaphysical presuppositions or supernatural
speculations, it focuses instead on the possibilities for enhancing personal worth
available to us here and now through enchanting the ordinary affairs of the day.
A grandmother’s love for her grandchild is at once the most ordinary of things
and the most extraordinary of things, the most common of things and the most
sublime.
Confucius, by developing his insights around the most basic and enduring
aspects of the ordinary human experience—family reverence, deference to others,
friendship, a cultivated sense of shame, education, community, and so on—has
guaranteed their continuing relevance. One characteristic of Confucianism
that is certainly there in the words of Confucius himself and that has made his
teachings so resilient in the Chinese tradition is its porousness and adaptability.
His contribution was simply to take ownership of the cultural legacy of his time,
to adapt the wisdom of the past to his own present historical moment, and then
to recommend to future generations that they do the same.30 What in English
is called Confucianism, associating this tradition with one person, is in Chinese
ruxue 儒學—the compounding learning of eighty generations of literati who have
participated in the corporate Confucian project.
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Holistic Thinking and the Reconstruction of the Notions of Harmony 9

The personal model of Confucius that is remembered in The Analects does not
purport to lay out some generic formula by which everyone should live their lives.
Rather, the text recalls the narrative of one special person: how he in his relations
with others cultivated his humanity and how he lived a fulfilling life, much to the
admiration of those around him. We might take liberties and play with the title of
The Analects, reading “discoursing” (lunyu 論語) more specifically as “role-based
discoursing” (lunyu 倫語). Indeed, in reading The Analects, we encounter the
relationally constituted Confucius making his way through life by living his many
roles as best he can: as a caring family member, as a strict teacher and mentor,
as a scrupulous and incorruptible scholar-official, as a concerned neighbor and
member of the community, as an always critical political consultant, as the
grateful progeny of his progenitors, as an enthusiastic heir to a specific cultural
legacy, indeed as a member of a chorus of joyful boys and men singing their way
home after a happy day on the River Yi. He offers us historical models rather
than principles and exhortations rather than imperatives. The power and lasting
value of his insights lie in the fact that, as I will endeavor to show, these ideas
are intuitively persuasive and readily adaptable to the conditions of ensuing
generations, including our own.
Indeed, invoking the Chinese natural cosmology as context, what makes
Confucianism more empirical than empiricism—that is, what makes Confucianism
a radical empiricism—is the fact that it respects the uniqueness of the particular
and the need for a generative wisdom that takes this uniqueness into account in
anticipating a productive future. Rather than advancing universal principles and
assuming a taxonomy of natural kinds grounded in some notion of strict identity,
Confucianism proceeds from always provisional generalizations made from those
particular historical instances of successful living, the specific events recounted in
the narrative of Confucius himself being a case in point.31

Holism and Its Implications for

Harmony and Order
With a clearer understanding of the holistic assumptions of both Dewey and
Confucianism, I now turn to a reflection on how harmony and order are to be
understood within this interpretive context and how the connotations of these terms
might differ from and need to be reconstructed out of a more familiar understanding
of order. The holistic, vital cosmology embraced by early Confucianism and Dewey’s
pragmatism has many implications for the way in which the emergence of an always
provisional, prospective order in the continuing human experience is to be
conceived. For example, such a dynamic holism entails a doctrine of intrinsic
relations that makes each particular event one of a kind, precluding the possibility
of strict identity and replication. Thus “kinds” are defined analogically rather
than by appeal to some self-same essential characteristic. Causality is not linear
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10 Order and Revolt

or separable from effect but is rather defused within and throughout such intrinsic
relations, where each event is made possible by the always changing pattern of
interdependent relations. Creativity is not wholesale but retail, expressed through
the productive growth in these same relations. Because of the uniqueness of
events, the emergent order entails the spontaneous emergence of novelty and
hence is not reducible to antecedent causes. Creativity, and its expression in the
human case as consummatory imagination, is radically situated as growth in
relations.
For Dewey and Confucianism, harmony is melioristic: the continuing qualitative
growth in relations that allows for the full accommodation of all of the participating
elements in the totality of the effect. Such growth is achieved through ars
contextualis—the art of mutual accommodation in the patterns of deference that
constitute a thriving family and a flourishing community. It is the achievement of
an aesthetic harmony that provides felt experience in our evolving humanity with
its consummatory quality. Such harmony is the product of a situated creativity
expressed as enhanced significance rather than as the necessary unfolding of
some far-off and ultimate origin, as new ideas rather than as the instantiation of
antecedent idealities.
It is for this reason that, in this holistic cosmology, harmony as agreement or
conformity—a sense of harmony where the standard for conformity is antecedent,
external, and privileged—has little relevance.32 I would argue that in the Deweyan
and Confucian aestheticisms, harmony cannot be understood in the sense of
conformity because it precludes the optimal expression of the unique elements
that come together to constitute an always particular experience of harmony.
Dewey describes the attainment of a participatory harmony out of tension and
conflict in the following abstract terms:

Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, and
because of, tension. . . . Form is arrived at whenever a stable, even
though moving, equilibrium is reached. Changes interlock and sustain
one another. Wherever there is this coherence there is endurance.
Order is not imposed from with out but is made out of the relations of
harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another.33

Dewey goes on to describe the attainment of an inner harmony within the

human experience itself, distinguishing it from mere pleasure as a consummatory
transformation of the conditions of life itself:

Pleasures may come about through chance contact and stimulation;

such pleasures are not to be despised in a world full of pain. But
happiness and delight are a different sort of thing. They come to
be through a fulfillment that reaches to the depths of our being—
one that is an adjustment of our whole being with the conditions
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Holistic Thinking and the Reconstruction of the Notions of Harmony 11

of existence. In the process of living, attainment of a period of

equilibrium is at the same time the initiation of a new relation to the
environment, one that brings with it potency of new adjustments to
be made through struggle. The time of consummation is also one of
beginning anew.34

For Dewey, harmony is not achieved at the expense of particularity but because of
the balance and equilibrium achieved among the various elements that constitute
the harmony:

There is an old formula for beauty in nature and art: Unity in variety.
Everything depends upon how the preposition “in” is understood. . . .
The formula has meaning only when its terms are understood to
concern a relation of energies. . . . The “one” of the formula is the
realization through interacting parts of their respective energies. The
“many” is the manifestation of the defined individualizations due to
opposed forces that finally sustain a balance.35

For Confucianism, it is quite specifically the family that is the ultimate source
and indispensable ground of an achieved harmony or propriety (li 禮) in all of our
roles and relations. As it states in The Analects: “Achieving harmony (he) is the
most valuable function of observing propriety in our roles and relations (li). In the
ways of the Former Kings, this achievement of harmony by observing propriety in
our roles and relations made them elegant, and was a guiding standard in all things
large and small. But when things are not going well, to realize harmony just for its
own sake without regulating the situation through observing propriety in our roles
and relations will not work.”36
Confucian role ethics so understood exhorts the human being to aspire to that
quality of conduct that makes relations stronger and thicker and more enduring.
Without being properly situated within these roles and relations, actions are
meaningless or worse. That is, a “harmony” that is effected by simply imposing
external constraints as a means of enforcing order—the external imposition of
laws, edicts, principles, or rules—is dehumanizing to the degree that it precludes
personal participation and confirmation.
In a holistic culture, the continuing rhythm, tempo, and musicality of an achieved
aesthetic harmony do the work of teleology, where the always improvisational
satisfaction among unique particulars is both the process and the goal itself, an
understanding of order that precludes as it does any dualistic divide between
cause and effect or means and end and eschews any notion of a final vocabulary.
To live intelligently is to focus one’s attention upon the familiar affairs of the day
and in so doing to bring lived roles and relations into meaningful resolution,
distinguishing harmony from discord, musicality from concatenation, equilibrium
and homeostasis from conflict.
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12 Order and Revolt

Holism and Its Implications for

Spontaneity and Revolt
A problem seems to attend our common yet paradoxical use of the word
spontaneity. As Brian Bruya has observed:

We can see the inception of what I call the Paradox of Spontaneity

in the interpretations that Epicurus and Chrysippus give to natural
human action. The Aristotelian internal teleology of natural objects,
including humans, according to Chrysippus, allows us to say that all
movement is spontaneous, that is, that there is no unmoved mover
outside the natural order.  For Epicurus, however, humans must
remove themselves from the determinacy of nature and choose freely,
thus spontaneously.  This paradox—that movement is spontaneous
as determined and spontaneous as free—persists even into present
everyday speech (e.g. we may say that grass grows spontaneously, or
that so-and-so spontaneously broke into song). Although the Greeks
did not have an equivalent for “spontaneity” as a term of art, they
clearly wrestled with this tension and were the foundation of all later
thought on the subject.37

Synonyms for spontaneous are on one side of the paradox impulsive, which
suggests randomness and disconnect, and on the other side automatic, referencing
something that is “predetermined.” Both meanings preclude any interesting
understanding of the role of agency. The term spontaneity, rather than referencing a
cultivated virtuosity, has come to connote either random, uncaused behavior or
predetermined, automatic behavior. This development is closely related to the
prominence of a creatio ex nihilo notion of creativity that reduces spontaneity to
either an agent’s impulsive and inexplicable action or to a preprogrammed
design over which the agent has no control. Rather than suggesting a cultivated
responsiveness on the part of the agent, spontaneity thus conceived refers instead
to actions that are unconstrained and unstudied in manner. The spontaneous
emergence of novelty on such a reading, far from being virtuosic, would not seem
to entail any personal cultivation at all.
Dewey offers us a fundamentally different understanding of spontaneity as a
collaboration between the meaning of past experience and the present stimulus
that triggers its bursting forth in novel expression:

Each of us assimilates into himself something of the values and

meanings contained in past experiences. . . . Some occasion, be it
what it may, stirs the personality that has been thus formed. Then
comes the need for expression. What is expressed will be neither the
past events that have exercised their shaping influence not yet the
literal existing occasion. It will be, in the degree of its spontaneity,
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Holistic Thinking and the Reconstruction of the Notions of Harmony 13

an intimate union of the features of present existence with the values

that past experience have incorporated in personality. Immediacy
and individuality, the traits that mark concrete existence, come from
the present occasion; meaning, substance, content, from what is
embedded in the self from the past.38

Dewey rejects out of hand the play theory of art as a freedom “found only when
personal activity is liberated from control by objective factors.”39 Spontaneity, far
from standing in contrast to or in opposition to work and order, is the serious
engagement with objective conditions to achieve a desired result: “The spontaneity
of art is not one of opposition to anything, but marks complete absorption in an
orderly development. This absorption is characteristic of esthetic experience; but
it is an ideal for all experience.”40
If we consult a Chinese–English dictionary, one equivalent given for spontaneity
is ziran 自然. When this term is applied to human agency, the reflexive “self-” (zi
自) aspect of ziran has to be understood as persons in their contextualizing roles
and relationships rather than as some separate and discrete self. Hence ziran is
always collaborative. In fact, ziran is the uninhibited virtuosity that defines the
character and conduct of Zhuangzi’s many craftsmen and enlightened exemplars
as they interact efficaciously with their mediums and their environments:

Butcher Ding was in the process of cutting up an ox for Lord Hui of

Liang. Wherever hand came in contact, wherever shoulder leaned
in, wherever foot trod down, wherever knee exerted pressure—the
twack of meat separating from bone would echo and the twing of
the knife’s blade would ring out, with every stroke singing a perfect
note consonant with “The Dance of the Mulberry Grove” and the
“Jingshou Chorale.”
“Magnificent!” exclaimed Lord Hui. “That technique could be
raised to such heights!”
Butcher Ding laid his knife aside and replied, “What I really aspire
to is to an insight into the way of things (dao) that takes one far
beyond any mere skill.”41

Spontaneity is the hard-won freedom of action captured in the description of an

evolving virtuosity in the life of Confucius himself: “The Master said: ‘From fifteen,
my heart-and-mind was set upon learning; from thirty I took my stance; from forty
I was no longer doubtful; from fifty I realized the propensities of tian; from sixty
my ear was attuned; from seventy I could give my heart-and-mind free rein without
overstepping the boundaries.’”42
To the extent that revolution is taken to mean one complete turn—a change so
dramatic and far-reaching that it constitutes a new beginning—it again has little
relevance for the holistic thinking of Dewey and Confucianism, and Daoism as well
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14 Order and Revolt

for that matter. James Carse makes a distinction between finite and infinite games
that might be useful in distinguishing between two different ways of thinking about
beginnings and endings in the human experience. A finite game is played between
two opponents according to a given set of rules within a finite amount of time, with
the objective of each of the players being to win. One chess game ends and another
begins by coming back to the starting point. Or perhaps the opponents will try a
different game altogether, introducing an even more dramatic new beginning.
An infinite game is different. The relationship between a parent and a child
entails a different sense of agency that is not restricted by set rules or a given time
frame, and the objective, far from being to win, is to strengthen the relationship
in order to continue the play. It is this sense of infinite games that is a more
relevant notion of progress in the holistic cosmologies of Dewey, Confucianism,
and Daoism. Progress, simply put, is growth in relationships—a growth that is
ultimately dependent upon personal cultivation and an educated imagination.